Schools aren’t failing because of a lack of effort. They’re failing because we keep solving today’s problems with yesterday’s playbook. Until we change how we implement change, no amount of new programs will fix a system designed to burn people out.

Every school leader, every district, every educator knows the story by now: “Kids are behind, absenteeism is climbing, mental health struggles are real, and the pressure to close gaps is relentless.” The recent NCES School Pulse Panel data reinforces those realities:

These numbers are real. They deserve attention, investment, and urgency. But they also sound eerily familiar. It’s the same story we’ve seen for decades, reframed each couple of years with a new “crisis” label. We fight symptom after symptom like we’re playing whack‑a‑mole and educators get burned out chasing surface fixes.

Why does the cycle continue?

Because our system is designed that way. Schools, districts, and states often measure success by what was deployed (the number of hours of tutoring, the number of students in intervention), not by how well it landed, adapted, and lived inside a building or classroom. To be clear, I am not pointing a finger at administrators and educators. Having been in their shoes, I know they are set up for failure. They are not given any training, systems, or tools of how to measure implementation. 

In education we love the shiny “what” from the latest armchair expert or vendor because that’s where funding comes, where grant proposals live, and what vendors sell. But implementation is treated as an afterthought. If the folks on the ground have no visibility into whether something is working in their context, no safe space to adapt, no embedded feedback loops, and no recognition for what they learn along the way, we inadvertently punish them for the system’s own rigidity.

That’s why many educators feel like they’re drowning in failure—not because they aren’t good, but because the system asks them to do impossible things in impossible ways.

What changes when we shift the lens

• From roll-out to roll‑with: Instead of deploying programs as monoliths, we treat them as experiments. Truly using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA). Make it part of the culture at your school and district.

• From black box to data in motion: Real-time, actionable data, not just end-of-year metrics, must guide decisions, inform pivots, and affirm what’s working.

• From hero to ecosystem: We stop expecting individual administrators or teachers to “make it work” in isolation. We support the entire system that enables sustainable execution.

• From burn‑out logic to capacity logic: We insist that the way we ask people to work daily sustains them, recognizes them, and honors the complexity of change.

This is exactly why I built Plan Forward, as a way to operationalize change differently in a way that administrators can do PDSA. It helps schools and districts implement any initiative, aligned with strategic goals, with built-in feedback loops, learning cycles, and guardrails for adaptiveness. Plan Forward is created for the reality of schools, meaning it is not a tool that asks for more time but rather gives time back.

Because it doesn’t matter what program you choose to adopt if you don’t also build how to bring it alive in your unique context in a way that is possible with the time you have when juggling an impossible job.

Let’s stop chasing symptoms. Let’s heal the system.